MUSEI CAPITOLINI
PALAZZO NUOVO
Piazza Campidoglio
tel. 06/39967800
critical
text by Gianluca Marziani
BEYOND
PHOTOGRAPHY…ASCLEPIUS
A museum that houses the marble perfection of past centuries. A black
marble sculpture from the 2nd century d.C., representing Asclepius, that
is considered a perfect Roman copy of a Greek original dating back to
the late Hellenistic period. Three young authors face to face to the iconography,
the material and the expressive tensions of that work in the Palazzo Nuovo
dei Musei Capitolini.
Lorenzo Castore, Stefania Di Marco and Mario Vespasiani weave together
archaic memory and the contemporary flow of those who like to experiment
the future. Their common starting point is the artistic means which is
considered the closest to truth: photography. Then, they take different
ways, new paths on which this language mixes with others loosing its linearity.
This results in a reconfiguration of the static classicism of marble,
that is given by the artists a new energy defining the dynamic vision
of the present. We thought this was a clever way to interpret the figure
of Ascepius, son of Apollo and Koronis, patron of medicine with a peculiar
centrality on Rome. Lorenzo Castore's technical perfection makes the framings
almost metaphysical and enhances the grain, the contrasts, the tensions
between the lights. Starting from here, a project that angles the look,
modernizing the muscular physicity and the strength of marble. Stefania
Di Marco makes mannequins that she animates, dresses up and puts in peculiar
situations. Then she photographs the scenes, so that the work will simulate
the truth through fictitious means. A world that comes back to Ascleplius
to invent a fake one which looks truer than the truth. Mario Vespasiani,
then, re-elaborates his shots with digital processes and pictorial passages
on canvas. This time, he photographed a young Roman boy in the same pose
as Asclepius, creating a sharp contrast between the smooth perfection
of marble and the raw prosaicness of life.
